n Orlando attorney had an important role in the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville Saturday
An Orlando attorney had an important role in the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville on Saturday.
Augustus Invictus, a former Libertarian Party candidate for U. S. Senate most famous for admitting he sacrificed a goat and drank its blood, was listed as a featured marcher for the Saturday event, which was roundly condemned after marchers carried Nazi flags, performed Hitler salutes and chanted white supremacist and anti-Semitic sayings while carrying torches.
Invictus lost the 2016 Libertarian primary for U. S. Senate to Paul Stanton, but not before state Chairman Adrian Wyllie resigned in protest. The Libertarian Party of Seminole County also disbanded and its chair, Don Menzel, resigned in protest of Invictus’s candidacy.
Wyllie alleged at the time Invictus wanted to lead a civil war in the country, recruit neo-Nazis to the party and supported a eugenics program.
“Clearly, this man is the absolute antitheses of a Libertarian. Violent Fascist and Neo-Nazi ideologies are completely incompatible with Libertarian values, ” Wyllie said in a statement in 2015.
Invictus denied he had white supremacist sympathies at the time, but the Tampa Bay Times reported Monday white nationalist leader Richard Spencer credited Invictus with writing a first draft of the “Charlottesville Statement.”
The statement, according to the Times, has tenets including, “Jews are an ethno-religious people distinct from Europeans, ” “Whites alone defined America as a European society and political order, ” “the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ is an invasion, a war without bullets, taking place on the fields of race, religion, sex and morality. At stake is Europe’s very identity, ” “we oppose feminism, deviancy, the futile denial of biological reality, and everything destructive to healthy relations between men and women, ” and “Leftism is an ideology of death and must be confronted and defeated.”
Invictus could not be reached for comment Monday.
A counter-protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and others injured Saturday after a car ran into them following the Charlottesville rally. An Ohio man, allegedly pictured carrying white supremacist paraphernalia during the march, has been arrested and charged.
President Donald Trump was criticized, including by members of the Republican Party, for not specifically condemning white supremacists and neo-Nazis by name in his statements following the march.
Republicans including U. S. Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush have condemned the Nazis, white supremacists and KKK members at the rally, with Rubio stating on Twitter Saturday that the country needs to hear that message from Trump himself.
YAYA of the National Farmworkers Ministry and the Coalition of Imokalee Workers protested outside of Wendy’s and urged a boycott for the Fair Food Agreement.
Columnist Scott Maxwell asks Jeb Bush and Gwen Graham why Florida politicians trek to a small Panhandle town to attend the Wausau Possum Festival.
